Internet outages up 17% in 2nd week of August

This weekly feature from S&P Global Market Intelligence, in collaboration with internet-service monitoring company ThousandEyes, aims to give remote workers insights into internet service disruptions.

The volume of internet outages globally increased 17% to 287 in the week of Aug. 7, compared to 245 disruptions in the prior week, according to data from ThousandEyes, a network-monitoring service owned by Cisco Systems Inc.

The interruptions for the Aug. 7 week came close to levels last observed in the first week of July.

U.S. outages also increased, with 108 disruptions, up 42% from 76 in the prior week. The U.S. total comprised 38% of the global outages for the Aug. 7 week, up from 31% the prior week.

ThousandEyes detected two notable outages in the previous week, including an Aug. 11 disruption at Sweden-based internet service provider Telia Carrier AB that affected downstream partners and customers in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. The outage, which apparently centered on nodes in London, ran for 21 minutes before it was cleared around 8:05 p.m. ET.

In the early morning of the next day, Aug. 12, another internet service provider, Virginia-based GTT Communications Inc., experienced an outage that appeared to center on nodes in Seattle. The interruption, which impacted some partners and customers in the U.S. and five other countries, lasted about 11 minutes and was cleared at about 5:50 a.m. ET.

ThousandEyes detected five collaboration-app outages in the Aug. 7 week compared to only one in the prior week. Four of these interruptions were observed in the U.S.

At the global level, business-hours internet outages accounted for 35% of the total during the Aug. 7 week, down 3 percentage points from the prior week. In the U.S., however, the same metric increased 5 percentage points week over week to 33%. Business-hour disruptions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa fell 8 percentage points to 35%, while such disruptions in the Asia-Pacific region decreased 7 percentage points to 37%.